One of the great pleasures of my months in Israel has been the time spent with Yan and Rosita, both scientists who emigrated from the Soviet Union with their two children in 1982. Any question about the family opens a new chapter in 20th-century history: the uncle who fought in the Spanish civil war and became a decorated hero of the Red Army; his brother, who spent 16 years in the gulag; Yan and Rosita's son, born in Moldova nearly 80 years after the state-sponsored massacre of Jews that precipitated the flight from eastern Europe at the start of the last century.

One Saturday afternoon, they invited me to their house in Rehovot, half an hour's drive south of Tel Aviv, to meet a group of their friends and relations, all scientists who have known each other since they were students at Novosibirsk in Siberia in the 1970s. They came to Israel because of anti-semitism, which emerged with Stalin's postwar delusions about a cabal of Jewish doctors he believed was trying to kill him, and was overlaid with state-sponsored anti-Zionism during the cold war when the USSR backed the Arab states.

"There was anti-semitism on two levels," says Uri, Yan's brother-in-law. "Everyday anti-semitism where you'd be told your nationality was Jewish - it was Lenin who came up with this, by the way - and you should go to Israel, though of course they wouldn't let you. Then there was official anti-semitism, which you felt every time you tried to get a job. I was told to my face that I wouldn't be hired because I was Jewish and you couldn't get a place at the best universities.

"I'm a good friend of the son of Donald McLean, the Cambridge spy. When they arrived in the 50s they were told to pick a different surname, and when they chose Ferguson the KGB said it wasn't a good name. But they stuck with it, and when he applied to university he had to get a letter from the KGB saying he wasn't a Jew."

None of them had been abroad before they emigrated to Israel. "I can't forget the feeling of pride," Luba says. "I remember seeing a soldier in a bank in Tel Aviv. I couldn't believe it - a Jew with money, so proud and confident. This is a little country with no resources, but look at the life here. We are from a country to which God gave everything, and finally the people have nothing. It's a pity that such a big part of my life was spent in the wrong place."

Soviet Jews arrived in dribs and drabs until the Russian aliyah of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. "I remember the excitement when our friends started to come," says Mark. "There were a lot of positive emotions and hope, but it's obvious that when a million people come there are good and bad among them."

Unusually for Jews from the former Soviet Union, all the friends are leftists. I asked why the Russians have formed such a rightwing element in Israeli society. "Even though I belong to the left I understand the right," Mark says. "For decades we were second-class citizens in the Soviet Union. Different people came here for different reasons but they all wanted to think of themselves as strong and proud.

"When the Russian teenagers died in the Dolphinarium terrorist attack [in June 2001], the country said, 'Now you are the same as us.' What to do about terrorism? In Russia, it has always been acceptable to use force to come to solutions. If you are in power, you use force to show that you are right."

Most devastating to the scientists has been the academic boycott of Israeli universities. Gregory, a mathematician who came to Israel in 1996, has been involved in the campaign against it: "It reminded us that there was no boycott against Russia because of the invasion of Afghanistan. At the moment, everything we read in the European media about Israel reminds us of what the Soviet Union said about it. Open Pravda in the 1970s and you'd read the same things, the same anti-Zionism, though at least with Pravda you knew it was lies.

"The European left has still not apologised for believing the propaganda about the Soviet Union instead of the facts, which were there for all to see. All the actions of anti-Zionism now have their prototype in the Soviet Union. Our daughter tried to apply for a PhD in the US and she was told, 'This university is good for Israelis, this one isn't.' It's just like the Soviet Union: 'This university is good for Jews, this one isn't.' Nothing has changed in that respect."